There was something in Mary Karr’s “The Art Of Memoir” that stuck with me.

I listened to this as an audiobook from the library so it’s difficult to quote exactly but the specifics are less important than the process. She mentioned searching for a scene from her life that showed an example of her father and, something. How he loved her or some other other characteristic.

Karr had a story, she had a sense of what was important about this angle on her history, and she was rooting around in her childhood for an event that would show the reader something relevant to the story.

This, I thought, is how fiction should be written. Root about in your world, in your character’s history, or in their present, for moments and scenes that make relevant statements about what you want to show to the reader.

#

There is a subtle difference between this versus being told to come up with the psychological source of your character’s anger or fear or love. For one, there are many existing possibilities and it’s a matter of picking the best one, which is how it should feel in fiction. For another, these fictional character histories are often written as internal narrative: reflective, lacking action, taking place as a dialog from the character to the reader.

As an example, I had three sections of backstory in a recent short story. I used some dialog to make it less dry and telling but they were largely internal narrative. As a writing exercise, I listed the important information of each section and for the first two I wrote scenes that would convey those same key points. With a little revision and some transition adjustments I swapped those in and the story came to life. The third section covered a longer period of time in fewer words, and once I had replaced the first two it was the only remaining section of static internal narrative so I left it as it was. I’ve seen the writing of Alice Munro quoted as examples of good telling, where she packs so much information into three or four sentences that would take paragraphs and paragraphs to convey it all with vignettes. I’m not to that level, but that is the ideal.

But I don’t think I would have written or chosen as good a moment or scene to write had I not first written myself into it, by writing it first as backstory, as largely internal narrative. Perhaps this is because I am a pantser and I needed to figure out the story by writing rather than by making notes or an outline.

 

So, figuring out what you want the reader to know is one thing and explaining it using internal narrative another, but it may be better yet if you go one step further and do what Karr did for her memoir: root around for a moment, a scene, a vignette that will allow the reader to see what you want them to know rather than telling them.

What are your strengths and weakness as a writer?

You might look at:

• Characters
• Setting
• Plot

How would you rate yourself on a scale of 1 – 10?

How do others see you?

Then, what about:

• Dialogue
• Conflict
• Prose
• Theme
• Description

But then there’s also:

• Variety
• Flow
• Balance
• Structure

And even within the elements there are sub-characteristics, such as for Character:

• Believablity
• Interest
• Consistency
• Depth

And the same with all the other basics, they can all be broken down to deeper levels.

I spend a lot of time looking for what I’m missing in my writing: action, description, clarity, flow. I also look in critiques for what others see as weaknesses: consistency, excess commas, murky wording. I’m trying to improve my writing, trying to make it better, stronger.

Like a musician, trying to improve his upper range to even his tone quality through the entire range. Or a pitcher working on his curve ball so that his fastball will be even more effective.

But there’s value in doing the opposite. In determining what you to best and emphasizing it.

• Writing powerful interactions if you write dialogue well.
• Building your story around tortured, complex characters if you are good at understanding and presenting them.
• Offering inspired settings and descriptions of landscapes and peoples if that always reaches your readers.

Playing to your strengths. Like Shaquille O’Neal who never became a decent free throw shooter. Or a trumpet player not worrying about his high notes because his strength is in his improvisation and ingenuity like Miles Davis. In a jazz big band the highest notes are written for the lead trumpet but solos often go to the second or fourth trumpet, where the strongest improviser sits.

So, where do you sit? What are your strengths and weaknesses?

• Start with an event, a cause. This cause will result in an incident, but don’t decide on the incident yet.
  • the cause may be minor; Joe stops to look in the pet store window.
  • the cause may be major; Joe drives his car through a red light.
• Determine a cause for that cause.
  • Joe lost his transit pass and has to walk
• Determine a cause for that cause, perhaps bringing in additional characters

 

• Consider bland, normal reasons for believably or to heighten realism, or, consider strange, bizarre reasons for comedy, surrealism, generating interest, or, consider themes or parallel tracks or levels or mixing these
• Consider bringing in additional characters so you can create a new branch of incidents that will still tie into the ultimate incident. Someone close to the original character will make it easier to tie their effect back to the ultimate incident, but, they could also be strangers that fate has thrown together only they didn’t expect it until the incident occurs.

“Begin at the start of the ending” is a writing aphorism. Open your story there and you set yourself up to easily carry through without losing the reader’s attention.

#

During a Twitter discussion on the use of literary devices, I said that I use flashback because I tend to start near the end and I need flashback to get at the history of the character and situation. One person assumed that if I’m starting near the end, then I know the ending before I begin writing. She was envious.

But I almost never know the ending when I start writing. I don’t even know what I’m writing about until much later. All I have is a situation and/or a character or just a character trait, or perhaps a technique to try or a restriction I want to play with.

My ability to craft prose has become quite decent and I can improvise off a small vision or idea for a few hundred words without difficulty. I do this by feeling around inside the situation hoping to find where it wants to go. Then I wait to see if the character or voice or situation inspires me to keep going. This I refer to as seeing if the story “has legs”.

#

So how am I starting near the end? When I don’t know the end?

I think it happens naturally. If the material has enough tension and cohesion to continue (ie. if the story has legs) then it doesn’t take too many words to write to the resolution of that tension.

These are 1,000 to 5,000 word stories, though in one case it became a 23,000 word novella. That one took 23,000 words because of the complexity of the situation. A lot of backstory and context was required —  some flashback, some internal narrative, as well as the POV and narrative and interaction of multiple characters — before I could explain how this all came to be, even though the primary story timeline is only six or eight hours long. Still, the story from middle to end is the resolution of those opening tensions. When the story opens the endgame has just begun, only none of the characters realize this (and neither did I, when I was working on early drafts).

This is slightly different for novels. My novels open with tension and situation and voice but the material feels more open-ended. The tension for a novel is a fact of life for the character rather than the one-time event or limited applicability condition of a short story, and it’s gonna take an entire novel to explore the different situations that the tension will affect.

#

So in a short story, if you open with tension and work towards its resolution, you will have started near the end. If instead you explain the situation, describe the characters, and then write the history to get to the moment with the tension you might start far from the end. And if that set up lacks interest, you may lose your reader before you get to the important parts.

As a reader for a publication, I see this problem all too often in submissions. Yes, especially for science fiction we need to know the world that you’ve built, in historical fiction we need to know the time and place, but don’t bore the reader by dumping it all at the opening. Describe it in a fascinating way that whets the reader’s appetite, or hold on to parts and tuck in snippets at natural points in the narrative.

Writing a story is not the same as experiencing reality.

For one thing, fiction is more interesting than 99% of most people’s reality.

Even creative non-fiction and memoir take reality and reshape it for presentation so it’s not boring, doesn’t include irrelevant moments, and has a coherent story or point.

There are some basic differences between good writing and reality, and reasons why those differences exist.

 

Dialogue

Fiction or even creative non-fiction rarely use actual dialogue. Too many ‘um’s and shortcuts and unclear wording.

A fictionalized version carries dialect and character traits and is clear when the character is intending to be clear and obtuse when the author needs the character to be obtuse.

Setting descriptions

When you walk into a coffee shop you carry a plethora of background or assumptions. What country are you in? City? Time of day? Previous times in this location? Previous experiences in this chain? How do you know what you want? Where is the menu? You expect the smell of coffee, display cabinet of snacks, sounds of canned music, or do you? Are they there, or are they missing?

The writer needs to give the reader some of the details that the writer may not think about when they walk into a coffee shop. The reader is not actually there and needs extra description to compensate.

Use of the seven senses

I’m not very Zen. I pay little attention to the feel of my clothes, the sound of my shoes on gravel, the flavor or temperature of my coffee, the smell of my toothpaste, the spin around our spiral staircase, the change in air pressure from 100 meters above sea level at my home to almost zero where my office is, the taste of my food. As long as these experiences are close to my expectations or previous experiences, I barely notice.

If you walk in the snow you sense the softness under your foot, hear the crunch, feel the cold, but if you were in this situation yesterday, why pay attention? The reader does not come into a situation with your expectations and background and previous experience. They need the information that you take for granted to help them understand, to help them to be there with you.

Time

Time is pretty constant unless you are an astronaut traveling at significantly different velocities than the rest of the planet.

In stories, time is presented at different speeds: important moments have lots of words, some internal narratives exist almost outside of time, and large chunks of irrelevant time brushing teeth, opening doors, driving, are skipped entirely. Most writers don’t have too much difficulty with this, though the balance between words allocated to crucial and less important moments is something that we all struggle with.

Detail

Two lines from a draft of a memoir read, “We stopped at Normandy, where my father had fought in the war. It was an emotional experience,” and then goes on to talk about the next stop. This is either an example including material simply because it happened even though it plays no part in the point of the story, or, more likely, an example of the writer failing to understand the difference between what they experience as they read the words to what the reader gets from those words.

As a reader, what do you sense is missing? Description of Normandy, past and present? Backstory about the father? Actual things the author saw, heard, thought? Explanation and description of the emotions so the reader can understand and experience them?

Now, try to get into the author’s head and understand why this writer wrote what they wrote. For them, all the missing context and backstory and memory of sights and emotions are conveyed by the words as given. ‘Normandy’ brings up sights and experiences. ‘Father’ and ‘fought in the war’ have many meanings and stories. ‘Emotional experience’ sums all the feelings their depth and flavors the sentence with it.

It’s all there. For the author.

But for no one else.